Friday, March 20, 2015

The US Latest Debacle in Yemen – Over $500 Million Worth of Military Aid Lost

“In war, truth is the first casualty.” - Attributed to Aeschylus (525-456 BC)

Oops! There goes another half billion dollars’ worth of war material lost to another enemy. This time in Yemen where until a few weeks ago President Obama could readily tout Yemen as the one foreign policy success story he could always hang his hat on. Yemen was the one place on this planet where Obama could avoid having to admit his foreign policy is not a total and abject failure. Yemen was where he could rationalize that his killer drone policy was actually working at keeping the enemy at bay. So what if most of the people killed by drones are innocent (over 96% by one recent analysis), many children and women that happened to get in the way. A little so called collateral damage never hurt the mighty US Empire’s warring ways.

In January Yemen’s US puppet government was overthrown by Iranian backed Shiite Houthi rebels affiliated with al Qaeda factions. These insurgent forces generated increasing strength over time in large part provoked by Obama’s predator drone policy regularly attacking and killing hundreds of mostly innocent civilians in Yemen since 2002. Last month during the ensuing unrest in the Yemen capital Sanaa, US personnel apparently were forced to close its embassy, having to evacuate US citizens from what’s now become another openly hostile, unsafe nation for Americans in the Arabian Gulf.

Subsequently the Pentagon in recent weeks had to slink before closed sessions of Congress to inform them that it fears that al Qaeda in Yemen now has in its possession countless small arms, ammunition, night-vision goggles, patrol boats, vehicles, aircraft and other large scale combat supplies that enable yet more so called Islamic extremists to wage yet more terrorism and war into the future. Pressed to account for the whereabouts of the weaponry, the Pentagon brass simply shrugged their shoulders and alluded to it most likely being in the wrong hands now. An anonymous legislative aide could only conclude, “We have to assume it’s completely compromised and gone.”

This much of the confiscated aid presumed missing and irretrievable was released:

And now just days after this Pentagon fiasco goes public, the latest just breaking story of yet more horrible news rubbing salt into Obama’s fresh licked wound is today’s announcement that four suicide bombers calling themselves an Islamic State branch in Yemen just killed at least 137 people in two mosques inside the Yemen capital of Sanaa. This level of violence in this war torn country is the worst in decades.

This disastrous series of events in Yemen is painfully reminiscent of last June’s ISIS invasion of Iraq and its capture of that nation’s second largest city Mosul. In both cases US trained and funded national security forces refused to even fight the rebels. Also rebels in each nation took possession of critical military bases. Speculation abounds in both cases over whether the order to cut and run came from the weak national government or with far more sinister implication the order each time might have originated from high command in Washington DC to willfully allow the hostile rebel forces to run amok seizing control of both countries. By simply abandoning both their military missions and positions, the national security forces in both Iraq and Yemen allowed al Qaeda militants free access to large arsenals of US weaponry and equipment.

However, it’s become increasingly clear that the US has been covertly financing and arming the Islamic extremists known as ISIS as its proxy mercenaries on the ground in both Syria and Iraq all along. So this takeover of yet more US weapons suddenly in Yemen smells like another rat. In all likelihood the United States crime cabal of a traitorous government may be simply capitalizing on the latest events in Yemen as yet another boost to keeping its state sponsored war on terror actively raging on into the indefinite future. As such the US may have actually planned the Yemen coup and through deceitful means purposely given the arms over to another so called fake enemy. Also the US propaganda machine can now take advantage of generating lots of negative publicity from these turn of events by blaming Iran for the Yemen instability since Iran has purportedly been backing the Shiite Houthi rebels currently in power.

Recall it was Yemen on order from General Petraeus in December 2009 that launched a cruise missile that killed 52 members of several innocent Yemen families early on in the Obama presidency. It was determined that 41 were civilians and 14 were women and 21 children. Petraeus proceeded to lie about all but three of the dead were terrorists. But before his lies came Obama pressuring the Yemen puppet government to lie about falsely admitting it was a Yemen missile that was responsible. However, an astute young journalist at the crime scene based on photos was able to identify the missile as belonging to America. Facing the embarrassment of scandal, it was Obama who then further pressured his Yemeni puppets to actually arrest the journalist for merely doing his job as a good and honest journalist. So after being falsely imprisoned because of Obama, later when the president of Yemen was about to release the reporter, again it was vengeful Obama who interceded and strong-armed Yemen to keep the journalist who dared print the lowdown truth exposing the US atrocity committed on his nation wrongfully in prison for three years.

This is a story Obama would like to forget, kind of like Benghazi. But rather than be honest and openly admit error for killing innocent families in Yemen, both Petraeus and Obama chose to lie about what they’d done. But Obama immorally went further far beyond just lying in punishing the young Yemeni reporter as criminal reprisal. In his first year in office this piece of evidence exposed Obama for being full of it when during his campaign he promised that his presidency would be far different from his psychopath predecessors Bush and Cheney, assuring the American voters that his administration would be the most “honest and transparent” in American history. Of course he’s only proven to be the opposite as the most secretive and oppressive administration in history far beyond even the Bush crime family.

The next Obama story and Yemen scandal to come along a couple years later was Obama acting as judge, jury and executioner in his choice to kill three Americans in Yemen. Without going through the “trouble and inconvenience” of rounding the first two Americans up and granting them their constitutional rights to a fair judicial process and trial for their alleged close ties to al Qaeda extremism, Obama defended his decision to simply murder them outright with a killer drone. Then just two weeks later at another location in Yemen out of pure spite and evil, Obama assassinated one of the earlier victim’s 16-year old son who had absolutely no affiliation or involvement with al Qaeda or terrorism. The Colorado born kid was simply hanging out with friends and relatives eating at a restaurant when all of them were suddenly blown away as totally innocent victims of Obama’s state sponsored terrorism from the skies. And the MSM presstitutes calling themselves journalists never even had the balls or decency to confront the murdering president on his crimes. Instead they and the American public heard Obama’s dismissive press secretary defend Obama saying the boy “should have had a more responsible father.” Then the annoyed Majority Senate Leader Harry Reid when facing questions told the world that if anybody deserved to die it was those three Americans.

Later still defending his murder of Americans, our president actually had the criminal audacity to matter-of-factly defend why he can foresee justifiably killing more Americans on US soil in the future. If he deems any of us as much as an enemy sympathizer, or for that matter a dissident opposing the current totalitarian police state, our Democratic president apparently will suffer no sleepless nights nor apparently have any qualms about murdering us right here in our homes in own country.

The psychopathic leaders of our nation will never ever admit to error nor having made mistakes and will further never express any remorse whatsoever over any of their previous decisions and actions, however heinous or appalling. But instead they will always calmly and coolly rationalize and readily justify them – displaying all the classic symptoms of true psychopaths. But then when you are a prominent member of the United States crime syndicate government, it mandatorily goes with the turf.

So Obama has a rather unpleasant checkered past he’d just as soon forget when it comes to his own Yemen foreign policy. Undoubtedly that was all the more reason his longtime predator drone, low intensity presence in Yemen just had to be his one shining example and model of successful foreign policy that was actually working as he’d planned. But four months after Obama was bragging about Yemen, its government fell to yet more terrorists. So now even that flimsy delusional cover has blown up in his face with this latest breaking scandal that the commander-in-chief’s Pentagon brass cannot even account for more than $500 million dollars’ worth of military aid sent to the Yemen government since 2007.

Yemen was the one struggling, troubled nation on the Arabian peninsula that Obama till recently could proudly claim that his fundamental shift away from those costly protracted war debacles in Afghanistan and Iraq begun under his neocon predecessors were once and for all history. Under Obama’s watch his foreign policy approach would be to skillfully and “humanely” avoid those kind of bloody drawn out wars that Americans eventually grow tired of. Instead his new policy of low intensity wars around the world using smaller Special Operations forces would circumvent the need for a large commitment of US troops on the ground. Instead Obama favored quietly replacing those long, costly and unpopular quagmires with his own low key, “out of sight, out of mind” dirty little secret wars utilizing the latest modern stealth warfare that’s quickly become his own personal favorite and his signature trademark – the one that in his weekly meetings with intel and military brass Obama himself got to decide who was to live and who was to die, using those magical predator drones. And now our president wants to spread his brand of terror around the world by selling drones to “US allies.” Killer drones always seemed cleaner and more surgically precise to him, after all no more messy, unsightly American blood spilled on foreign soil but only that of those tan-skinned Moslems that after 9/11 nobody really liked anyway. And even their red blood was/is never shown to Americans back home thanks to the sanitized version of propaganda war known as embedded presstitute journalism.

But now that the cat’s out of the bag in Yemen, Obama’s best laid plans have once again been foiled by his brilliant Pentagon war strategists “losing” yet another arsenal of US military arms. That military aid intended for Yemen’s US puppet government to defend itself from insurgency recently got handed over to the big bad al Qaeda wolf that’s been banging at the government door. Yet with all the intelligence forces of the CIA and Special Ops stationed there in Yemen for years, we’re supposed to believe that they never saw this latest coup even coming - more bullshit. Lo and behold, more bad guys a few weeks ago were easily able to overthrow another weak, corrupt, US installed puppet and managed to abscond with over $500 million worth of war weapons that can now be used against America at some point in the future.

Where have we seen this rerun before? Oh yeah, last year in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Libya, come to think of it, wherever Empire goes, certainly all over the Middle East and Africa we’ve observed this same inexcusable pattern before. As far as keeping the US war on terror compliments of the crime syndicate in Washington going forever, pretending to lose weapons to the enemy always seems to work on the misfed, dumbed down American population. What they aren’t counting on are the fed up (as opposed to misfed) American citizens who’ve learned to not be fooled by the sinister sleight of hand disinformation trickery that our own government and mainstream media are constantly and deceptively attempting to pull the bull over our eyes.

Let’s count the ways in a brief recap of past waste and lost war material during this last decade alone in Afghanistan and Iraq. First off, well over $6 trillion dollars have already been spent on criminally destroying those two nations with significant residual damage done to the struggling US economy during a stagnating recession era, and that’s not even including the far greater and tragic human cost to so many people’s lives. A year ago it was reported that the US was leaving behind in Afghanistan $6 billion worth of 170 million pounds of equipment including 850 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, furniture, non-classified computers, generators, chemical toilets, you name it, and the US government left it. Over 387 million pounds of scrap were sold to local Afghans for $46.5 million that at least got recouped.

Apparently a huge surplus of those MRAP vehicles that were shipped to the warfront were actually never needed nor used. More Empire wastes had to be given away or scrapped in Afghanistan than in Iraq because Afghanistan has less capacity to operate and maintain the equipment than the Iraqis. Parts shortages also became a major problem in attempting to salvage equipment. Much has been donated to the national security forces but tons of wasted equipment and supplies were lazily discarded that could have gone to the Afghan people. Just as the war itself was a tragic and costly bloody mess that never did any good for either the US but especially Afghanistan, so went the trillions of wasted taxpayer dollars decimating America’s middle class that bore the brunt of funding that horrific, senseless war.

Another near half million weapons in Afghanistan were never even accounted for. American oversight was very poor, but Afghanistan’s inventory mechanism was virtually non-existent, so concluded the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Last year Vice reported that despite allocating two-thirds of a billion dollars’ worth of weapons and equipment to Afghan security forces, hundreds of thousands may be lost in abandoned warehouses in unknown locations or worse yet sold on the enormous black market that’s always operated throughout the dozen year war in Afghanistan. Similar to the recent Yemen theme, most items sold in the underground market ultimately ended up in Taliban hands.

Overwhelming evidence accumulated over the years verifying that tons of US arms and ammunition procured by the Taliban enemy were eventually used to kill Americans, portending a repeated tragic future scenario with the recent loss of weapons in Yemen. High incidence of the National Afghan Army selling US issued war goods to black market or directly to Taliban was extremely rampant. Gross acquisition errors caused a surplus of 83,184 unutilized AK-47’s much of which quickly made its way to being sold on the black market and then utilized by the enemy. Just to get an idea of how serious this problem was of missing US equipment and arms falling into the wrong hands, in certain districts it surpassed the opium trade within the world’s largest opium producing nation.

Of course the US government has been criminally involved in drug smuggling for decades, even misusing US military personnel to act as opium field guards. Allegedly that was among the burning issues that motivated the not-so-friendly fire assassination and scandalous cover-up of NFL star Pat Tillman. As in Iraq, corruption at all levels and ranks by both civilian and military Americans as well as Afghanis plagued both the waste problem as well as the war effort. Also as the longest running war in US history dragged on, with alarming frequency national Afghan soldiers began turning on and killing their American trainers, sadly amounting to a third of the US deaths in Afghanistan during 2012, the same year that more American veterans were committing suicide than were dying in combat on the Afghan warfront.

This same unending pattern of waste, fraud, theft, corruption and ongoing “lost” weapons and equipment was notoriously present during the decade long war in Iraq and now with Iraq War III it’s still going on to this day. Back in 2007 it was reported that while General Petraeus was tasked with training Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, 190,000 AK-47’s and pistols went unaccounted for. 30% of the weapons slated to Iraqi forces were unknown. In Afghanistan that figure rose to 43%. As of the latest figures from August 2011, an estimated $60 billion in war funds were lost to waste, poor planning and corruption fraud in both Afghanistan and Iraq. In four years of continued boondoggling, that number is likely up to $80 billion now and still rising.

This loss of US weapons has become the emerging standard US foreign policy, pretend through gross incompetence and mismanagement (having had so much practice at it) that you “accidentally on purpose” misplace billions of dollars’ worth of killing machine equipment just so those Islamic extremists we love to hate so much can get their grimy little hands on it. The Special Ops US advisors apparently stationed there in Yemen all these years suddenly became frightened when those insurgent meanies, the Shiite Houthis, successfully pulled off an “unanticipated” coup and our fiercest, best and brightest black ops warriors suddenly had to flee from the capital for their lives last month only to allow the barbarians crashing at the gate to conveniently take possession of all their left behind war toys. Déjà vu all over again. Not only does America lose all its wars, the last victory coming 70 years ago, but the US also seems to always end up losing all its weapons too. No wonder the great American Empire-turned paper tiger keeps losing war after war virtually nonstop since World War II, it can’t seem to hold onto its billions of tax paid for weapons.

Or the more likely explanation behind these recurring Empire follies is the ruling crime syndicate that’s infiltrated and treasonously taken over the US government by design is supposed to lose all its wars in faithful obedience to its New World Order agenda - destabilizing every Third World nation possessing oil/wanted precious natural resources by secretly creating, funding, training and yes, arming the so called enemy, never failing to employ those fanatical Islamic extremists those dumbed down, ignorant masses xenophobically love to fear and hate. This way we keep the ruling elite crime families like Bush and the Rockefellers happy by simply invoking the familiar “threat to national security” card as justification for imposing Orwellian police state counterterrorism laws at home and throughout the world.

Creating failed states all over the globe that in turn opens the floodgate to predatory NWO vultures like the transnationals, the World Bank and IMF loans fast moving in to further rape, plunder and enslave yet more of the world population buried forever deep in Ponzi scheme debt. And even though those paid mercenary stooges called al Qaeda or ISIS or Islamic jihadists are not practicing Moslems at all but simply paid mercenary thugs doing the crime syndicate Empire’s dirtiest bidding, with enough propaganda lies accompanied by the bi-monthly dog and pony show of the latest beheading, you’ve successfully manipulated your forever war on terror. Works every time. That way the earthly raping, pillaging and plundering can go on with even more of a vengeance that without this hired gun villain playing their part, none of this terror could even remotely be possible. And just like that after the international crime cabal’s inside 9/11 job, whallah! The New World Order is here.

In the same way that the US is repeatedly getting caught red-handed maintaining the supposed enemy’s supply line in Iraq and Syria with regular airdrops of necessary food and arms supplies, the latest uncovered evidence released by Iraqi ground forces wiretapping conversations between US military and ISIS, this pretend game to also keep losing US weapons to the fake enemy is another sinister lie that’s just too preposterous and unbelievable to continue swallowing. You can fool some of the people as dumbed down as they are some of the time with nonstop propaganda bullshit, but the US government cannot get away with continuing to fool all of us all the time. At this point enough of us are on to them, having arrived a while ago at the realization that the ugly truth is that the criminal syndicate posing as the US federal government is the treasonous true enemy of its own people as well as the entire world. Its relentless agenda of perpetrating nothing but more war, lies and bloodshed on the earth’s population must be stopped and the traitors in our own government must be held accountable.

Joachim Hagopian is a West Point graduate and former US Army officer. He has written a manuscript based on his unique military experience entitled “Don’t Let The Bastards Getcha Down.” It examines and focuses on US international relations, leadership and national security issues. After the military, Joachim earned a master’s degree in Clinical Psychology and worked as a licensed therapist in the mental health field for more than a quarter century. He now concentrates on his writing and has a blog site at http://empireexposed. blogspot. com/. He is also a regular contributor to Global Research and a syndicated columnist at Veterans Today.